"You hard?" "Wanna play?" "I want you to tell me exactly what you're doing to yourself." If any of these approaches work for you, then you very well might be able to handle 90 minutes more of the same. Hugh Harrison’s Jerker (1991) was adapted for video from Robert Chesley's one-act play Jerker, or The Helping Hand: A Pornographic Elegy with Redeeming Social Value and a Hymn to the Queer Men of San Francisco in Twenty Telephone Calls, Many of Them Dirty (1986). For the entirety of the film, two gay men talk sometimes hot, sometimes filthy, sometimes sweetly, and sometimes heavy on the phone with one another. If you're looking for an action flick that takes place outside your mind or your pants, this is not the right movie for you. But if being led verbally through a variety of sexual scenarios while watching two men imagine the same has your curiosity standing up, then you have plans tonight to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Jerker's theatrical premiere.
Phone sex is not easy to pull off in film. While one might expect a story that is solely conversation in unchanging environments to become an endurance test as a viewing experience, Jerker has a lot of surprises going for it. The film starts with Bert (Tom Wagner) in bed as J.R. (Joseph Stachura) rings him up one night, and most nights thereafter. In this relationship, roles or power dynamics are neither explained nor agreed to: they become comfortable habits for the two men, who only know each other over the phone. Naïvely boyish and yuppie-esque, Bert, who has an enormous fish tank in his spacious and tidy bedroom, never finds out that J.R. sleeps on a pull-out couch in a cramped apartment that doubles as his painting studio. Nor does Bert, who keeps a stuffed bear on his nightstand and occasionally likes to get high, ever find out that J.R. uses two forearm crutches when he isn't lying in bed, usually naked and talking to Bert. As the phone calls become more routine, the men become closer through the same shared secret: that they genuinely enjoy, and have come to depend on, each other's verbal company, whether or not they are talking themselves through sexcapades that involve picking up strangers, golden showers, BDSM, or role-playing.
“Jerker” is not just used here as a term for getting off though. Set during the height of the AIDS epidemic, Jerker invokes the term “tearjerker.” At first seeming largely disconnected from the real-world epidemic, Bert and J.R.’s conversations are slowly infected by the devastation of the off-screen crisis. Their phone calls are isolated islands—safe harbors separate from the people they know who are dying and the fear that death may come whenever they do. Phone sex is their safest sex, but it still doesn't protect them against everything. If you're calling for a good time, beware.
Jerker screens tonight, September 24, at Anthology Film Archives as part of the series “Narrow Rooms.”
